Context‐dependent social behaviour: testing the interplay between season and kinship with raccoons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Animals are organized in a wide range of social structures. Variability in sociality is found both within and among species and is influenced by extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Here we examine the interplay between social behaviour, social thermoregulation and kinship in shaping sociality. We do so for raccoonProcyon lotor, a species suggested to exhibit flexible sociality – from solitary to highly gregarious. We hypothesize that this variation in sociality is driven by environmental conditions, relatedness and their interaction. We used proximity‐logging telemetry collars to quantify intraspecific encounters and infer social behaviour among female raccoons. We tested the effect of extrinsic (season and temperature) and intrinsic (pairwise relatedness) variables on proximity. We monitored 15 female raccoons fromApril 2010 toAugust 2011, which composed 120 dyads. Daily proximal encounter rate was eight times higher in winter (mean ± standard error: 24.1 ± 4.2) than in summer (3.0 ± 2.6) and daily encounter duration was 12 times longer in winter (558.8 ± 130.3 s) than in summer (43.4 ± 33.1 s). We also found a negative relationship between ambient temperature and proximal encounter rate, which suggested that female raccoons use social thermoregulation as a mechanism to reduce energetic costs in cold environments. Finally, we found that relatedness was positively correlated with encounter rate during summer and winter. Our results suggest that ecological factors, such as seasonality, may affect the evolution of sociality in temperate species, and that the evolution of social thermoregulation in raccoons is likely driven by kin selection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".